i voted for vi, because i use it by default. it is always there, and works the same (well, you know what i mean) on different systems. My first laptop had a nonfunctional escape key though, so somebody advised me to use emacs instead of vi (as, at that time i was a 100% newbie). I did like emacs, however having heard a lot of comments from people about bloat and unneccessary features, i tend to agree. also, emacs is not default on many systems, it is a third party application, as it were.

For GUI text editors though, i would choose gedit. It's not in the list i noticed, i was about to choose nedit in its absence, but had to go for vi, since i do actually use it more. When writing html i use bluefish, it has nice colour highlighting, but you'll need to rattle through the preferences on first run to set it up.

Other text based editors i liked were joe, nano, pico and jed. joe has a nice thing where it can sort of emulate emacs and pico (called by typing jmacs or jpico instead of joe) which i liked a lot. on smaller systems for older PCs, it can be a better idea to have joe instead of emacs for this reason.